I thought OSNews would be a good forum to talk about a matter that has been weighing on my mind lately primarily because the site has been so focused on Apple's patents and litigation as of late. The news that HP, the largest PC manufacturer in the world is spinning off or getting out of this business is what really prompted me to write this article.

That's speculation, not fact, and I counterspeculate that they would look and work more like CDE, UMPC, Blackberry, and Creative Zen respectively. Apple repeatedly puts the most work into an elegant design that the rest of the industry treats as a free template, originally with the Mac but especially now with iPhone and iPad knockoffs running Android. That they're trying to fight that is no vice, and if they win, it will be a positive precedent for originality, much needed after WebOS's failure. Lazy copying makes the world stand still.

Based on history of other technologies, I can make an educated guess that we would not have stayed with "CDE, UMPC, Blackberry, and Creative Zen". Otherwise it's not Creative Zen we would have been stuck with, it would be a portably wind-up vinyl player.(Since you imply that we would stay at the level of the first invention)